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Comment by sigmonsays | Hacker News Reader

That actually hurts a little. I hope you reconsider, music is an art, and allowing a computer to regurgitate previous works over and over and be ok with it is awful.

Art is to be experienced and enjoyed, not just take whatever trash is thrown at you and be ok with it.

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The way so many people on HN and elsewhere don't value art at all is pretty depressing. I don't know if it's a side effect of lack of exposure to art and the humanities growing up or something else, but I can't imagine living that way. What a dull experience life would be without art.

It's equally interesting to hear people talk about "what a dull experience life would be without art" because sometimes people want low brow entertainment, some of the time, as it's not like they're wholly rejecting human made art altogether. Sometimes I will laugh at a dumb AI generated video, it doesn't mean that's all I watch or experience.

HN is an interesting case, because a lot of those types of comments are likely to be either astroturfing, people who work at those companies, or people who are invested in them. I wouldn't extrapolate too much to the rest of humanity based on the people here.

You might overthink this as well, reality is most people just want to type `XXXX mix` and they just want to have this playing for 1h with nice backgrounds and call it a day, I doubt most actually care if it's AI or not. They might care only if you tell them. I hope I'm wrong.

There is also the genuine interest in a group to play AI tracks out of curiosity which is entertaining on its own as well, especially for the ones unaware of what it can produce (particularly since 2026).

I actually agree with you but I consider most modern music to already be artificially created. It’s not a computer but rather coming from industry chosen artists, corporate publishing, corporate marketing, and so on. Each step removing any beauty or controversy.

you can easily pull up contemporary indie bands with 5000 listeners on spotify, you can also easily pull up non-modern music too. if you want something definitely non-corporate, they have Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.

My take is that music _can be_ an art but it can also be other things, the same way sequential photos played back quickly can be an art but can also be a screensaver.

(I say this as a musician if that gets me extra cred somehow.)

most music, movies, "drawings" etc are art, and are trash. all these "art with soul" and "soulless trash ai" from people who don't even believe in soul are getting tiresome.

Please, listen to the music you think is soulful and leave rest of us out of your luddites. Nobody is asking to ban arts by humans.

Plenty of people use music as a fidget toy while working or studying. Not everything has to be a masterpiece.

There's more quality ambient music out there recorded by actual humans than you can listen to in a lifetime already.

Yeah. It’s not like there’s a dearth of human-created music.

Not always quite enough.

I've seen a few people discuss a desire for custom "Muzak", AI generated to fulfill a need. Upload your gym workout, and have it generate tracks to match each exercise -- right genre, BPM, type of track, right times of intensity and cooldown.

Of course you can do this with human made music in theory, but it'd be very hard to find the right tracks to match and you'd probably struggle with variety.

I think that attitude has downstream effects that are spiritually unhealthy. You should feel off-put by the idea of mentally sating your human brain with a soulless, algorithmically optimized imitation of art. We evolved with art as a species. I don't think anyone should be trying to "logic" their way into thinking humans are optional in art, even if it's something you're passively consuming.

If your brain can't tell the difference, then...what's the difference? In other words I can like human made art but it doesn't mean I won't sometimes want to see other imitations of it, especially if they're interesting.

It's like junk food, sometimes I want trash, especially trash that can be highly specifically tuned to my particular taste or mood that day, e.g. a mashup of X and Y genres with Z influence, as Suno does. Humans cannot make specific music like that because we are finite in time and effort.

no trashfood is attractive due to the economics of it.

if really good tasting food was just as easy to come by and cheap, the demand for fastfood would decline massively.

That's a bit gatekeepy IMO. Some music is art. Most music isn't. It also depends what you want from music. There's a difference between relaxing while listening to great songs and "background" music for work. I can't listen to lyrics while writing / coding / working in general, so I prefer simple repetitive or predictable genres. EDM / trance / techno / lofi depending on what I'm working on. We can agree that doesn't have to be art to be useful.

> allowing a computer to regurgitate previous works

That's not what "AI" music is, and you really should read into how it works before regurgitating (heh) miss-conceptions.

the slop existed before AI and in every era (from the beatles to britney spears), and for some people, it's all they need. why demonize AI-generated music?

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